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A U.S. Human Well-being Index (HWBI) for Multiple Scales: Linking Services Provisioning to Human Well-being Endpoints (2000-2010)
Citation:
Smith, L., L. Harwell, Kevin Summers, H. Smith, C. Wade, K. Straub, AND J. Case. A U.S. Human Well-being Index (HWBI) for Multiple Scales: Linking Services Provisioning to Human Well-being Endpoints (2000-2010). U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-14/223, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
Communicate methods for HWBI modeling framework and results from application of HWBI framework to multiple scales and population groups.
Description:
objective of this report is to characterize well-being at multiple scales in order to evaluate the relationship of service flows in terms of sustainable well-being. The HWBI results presented represent snapshot assessments for the 2000-2010 time period. Based on the spatial and temporal availability of the data, results were confidently calculated at the state, region, and national scales. Finer spatial resolution results, such as county, include greater uncertainty. Provisioning is evaluated at the state, regional and national scales for 22 different services. The functional relationships between services and well-being endpoints are modeled at the state level to examine service interactions and to evaluate the potential influence of service flows on domains and overall well-being. In this report, multiple scale HWBI values are summarized. The whole of the United States is divided into nine GSS regions. These groupings are the same divisions of the United States Census. The nine regions discussed in this paper are Pacific, Montain, West North Central, West South Central, East North Central, East South Central, New England, Middle Atlantic, and South Atlantic (Fig. ES-2). The HWBI values have also been calculated for each of the 50 states and 3,143 counties. The baseline HWBI values referred to in the results are based on a decadal block of metric data (2000-2010). Services provisioning results are presented for each state for the baseline 2000-2010 period with references to GSS regional and national scores. The modeled relationships between each of the services and the well-being domains during the 2000-2010 time period, derived from functional equations, are also presented.